7 Highly Rated Stocks on Sale

I am always looking for a good deal, whether that means buying an extra box of Golden Grahams when they're on sale or pouncing on undervalued stocks. The idea that anybody would sell a stock for less than its worth may seem silly, but legendary value investor Ben Graham (no relation to the cereal) tells us, by way of allegory, how we can look out for these situations.

In The Intelligent Investor, Graham introduces readers to a wacky chap named Mr. Market. Mr. Market's game is to pay you house calls on a daily basis to offer to sell you interests in businesses he owns or to buy from you interests in businesses you own. Sometimes Mr. Market will show up at your door very excited and offer you premium prices for your holdings, while at other times he'll be inconsolably depressed about the future and will offer to sell you what he has for as low as pennies on the dollar.

So to find some of the stocks that Mr. Market is depressed about, I've turned once again to The Motley Fool's CAPS investor community. Each of the companies below had been given a five-star rating (the highest) by our community of investors just 30 days ago:

Data from Motley Fool CAPS as of Dec. 2.

As the table shows, these stocks are all still very well-regarded by the CAPS community despite their underperformance over the past month. While these are not formal recommendations, they could be a great place to kick off some further research. I'll even get you started with some thoughts on Global Gains pick Allied Irish Banks.

Why so blue?
As if we really need to cover this. Well, let's see, there's a banking crisis going on the world over. Banks are taking big write-offs as they realize that their lending standards were a wee bit looser than they should have been. And we can't forget that things have gotten so bad that many once-mighty banks -- I'm looking right at you Citigroup (NYSE:C) -- have been reduced to paupers at the feet of the government.

Allied Irish may not be in the same camp as Citi, but it's been slicing and dicing its earnings forecasts as the pot of water it's sitting in continues to heat up. Even more of a bummer is the fact that the fat 28% dividend yield that Yahoo! Finance still lists is no more. The company suspended its dividend to conserve capital.

What the bulls say
But Ireland isn't the U.S. -- which can have both positive and negative implications here -- and Allied Irish is actually a pretty far cry from Citigroup. And though the company has certainly been chopping up its earnings target, it's still expecting somewhere around $1.50 in profit per share for this year. There's no guarantee that the target won't be cut again before the year is out, but if it hits that number, we're looking at a pretty cheap stock on a price-to-earnings basis.

And Allied Irish still has a very strong vote of confidence from the CAPS community. Of 1,901 members who have weighed in on the stock, 97% think that it will outperform the rest of the market. CAPS All-Star airplane44 recently weighed in with some cautiously bullish thoughts:

The EU has strong backing and Ireland has enjoyed a boom from EU money. They are conservative and tend to be on the cautious side of lending. The [Allied Irish Bank] is well known and trusted in Ireland. Having said that Ireland still has over 12% unemployment.

So do you think the recent drop has created a good buying opportunity? Or will Allied Irish continue to be plowed by the global financial crisis? Let the community know what you think -- head over to CAPS and share your thoughts with the other 120,000-plus players currently part of the community. Even if you'd prefer to pass on Allied Irish, you can check out a couple of the other stocks listed above or any of the 5,400 stocks that are rated on CAPS.

More CAPS Foolishness:

• 5 All-Star Stocks Fighting the Tide
• 5 Top-Rated Value Stocks
• 5 Dynamic Dividend Stocks